Health Reform: Purchasing Cooperatives Have an Increasing Role in Providing Access to Insurance (Testimony, 06/30/94, GAO/T-HEHS-94-196). One of the few areas of widespread agreement in the health care debate is that small businesses and other small organizations have a tough time buying and keeping health insurance for their employees. Some small groups cannot obtain health insurance at any price because of the health status of just one of their workers. Even those able to secure coverage may face extremely high premiums. One response to this problem is to pool the buying power of individual small firms. Under insurance purchasing cooperatives, large numbers of relatively small organizations band together to reduce their administrative expenses, pool their insurance risk, and increase their clout to get a better deal. GAO believes that the criticism of coops as too regulatory and too bureaucratic has been overstated. Coops are a proven and economical way for firms to buy insurance. Coops generally operate with small staffs and have greater regulatory authority than many health reform proposals would allow. They rarely, however, administer subsidies for the poor or the unemployed, a key requirement under many health care reform bills. GAO suggests that more attention needs to be paid to several governance issues, including the composition of coops' governing boards, representational safeguards, and the potential for politicization of appointments. --------------------------- Indexing Terms ----------------------------- REPORTNUM: T-HEHS-94-196 TITLE: Health Reform: Purchasing Cooperatives Have an Increasing Role in Providing Access to Insurance DATE: 06/30/94 SUBJECT: Health insurance cost control Insurance premiums Health care services Health care cost control Employee medical benefits State-administered programs Non-government enterprises Administrative costs Health insurance Health maintenance organizations IDENTIFIER: Clinton Health Care Plan Health Security Act National Health Care Reform Initiative Medicaid Program California Florida Minnesota Wisconsin Washington ------------------------------------------------------------------------ We regret that electronic text of GAO Testimony is not available at this time. See the GAO FAQ - Section 2.0 for printed copy ordering information. The FAQ is automatically retrieved with all WAIS search results or can be obtained by sending e-mail to: [email protected]